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| Lady Gaga arriving at the Met Gala |
Something tells me the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual Costume Institute exhibition, "Camp: Notes on Fashion" will be full of fabulous costumes but may or may not be worth a trip from anywhere.
Sunday's New York Times published an interview with six gay men who might know what exactly is camp— a professor at Columbia, two performance artists, a model, Ru Paul's costume designer, and a photographer. They tried to define "camp" and didn't exactly succeed. I agreed with 86-year-old James Bidgood, who said "I don't know what anyone's talking about!"
I've always felt the world of camp belonged to male homosexuals, and what was camp was up to them. Camp was almost a term of endearment, a so-bad-it's-good kind of thing, a crowning glory of bad taste viewed affectionately. Liberace might have been really awful, but he was camp.
What's the difference, you may ask, between kitsch, camp, pop and irony? I'm going to take a stab at this very murky gene pool. And I will do it with aprons.
KITSCH is a 1950's Betty Crocker-style apron:
CAMP is that apron worn by a drag queen:
POP is an apron referencing an Andy Warhol soup can:
IRONY is an apron referencing an Andy Warhol soup can but picturing Donald Trump:
All this can be debated, and that would be the problem. I wonder just how the Met has the chutzpah to take on camp and what they will do with it. While no doubt this will be a fun show, not only may it beg the question "What is camp?", it may ask "What is fashion?"
Will there be answers?
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